Chicago Daily Observer

“Sometimes, you only get one chance to make a first impression. This is Pope Benedict XVI‘s big chance,” says Sun-Times religion columnist Cathleen Falsani, who recommends he speak “words of solace,” of “love. Just . . . love,” He should be grateful for such advice. Mine would be that he just make sense.

Another advisor, Bob McClory, wants the pope to say he doesn’t know what’s wrong with the church and so to call a bunch of meetings to find out.

Bob the grizzled veteran – Medill-Northwestern, Chicago Reader, National Catholic Reporter, and the nation’s flagship Catholic liberal organization Call to Action fill out his credits – and Cathleen the still-fresh-faced columnist with ten or so years reporting and writing under her sash both want Benedict XVI to chill and stop clinging to a creed outworn or at least frayed at the edges.

“It is time for change,” ... Read More...

I’d like to be able to feel Andrew Greeley’s pain, but he hurts in so many places, I wouldn’t know where to start.

It’s a darn shame Obama had to “defend his outspoken pastor,” says G. in his Sun-Times column. I would have said he had to defend himself for picking the guy, and not in a month of Sundays at Trinity UCC on 95th St. or in any other church would I let him off the hook with “outspoken.”

“There is no evidence at all that the senator identifies with his clergyman, and overwhelming evidence to the contrary.” Other than he picked him as a veritable soul mate and guide and stayed with him 20 years.

What better sign do we have that Obama Central is running scared in the wake of Rev. Jeremiah’s sermons than this plaintive plea by Sun-Times columnist and O. enthusiast Mary Mitchell:

But frankly, critics and those who are supporting a candidate other than Sen. Barack Obama for the Democratic nomination have gotten all of the mileage they can out of this debate. [No.]

Count me among those who wondered if the grandmother who worried about black men she passed on the street were still living. Answer: yes.

Here’s John Fund:

Mr. Obama’s campaign has made clear that his 84-year old grandmother, who has asked to be left alone, should be considered off-limits to political reporters. But yesterday, it was Mr. Obama who didn’t leave her alone when he used her for one of the central themes of his speech.

O. said he can’t disown Rev. Wright, who spoke from a pulpit to a crowded church that sold CD’s with his sermons recorded, any more than his grandmother, who raised him and along the way made “stereotypical” remarks in private that made him “cringe.”

Don’t they teach logic at Harvard? Or gratitude in church? Did Wright make him cringe?

The plot thickens in the matter of Oprah Winfrey’s belonging to or attending Trinity United Church of Christ on 95th St. in Chicago, as mentioned in various places, including in a Chi Trib piece in January 2007:

The Vatican chimed in on the ills of the day:

This latest update on how God’s law is being violated in today’s
world comes from Msgr. [Bishop in the non-Vatican term] Gianfranco
Girotti, head of the Vatican’s Apostolic Penitentiary.

He pointed to ’‘violations of the basic rights of human nature’’
through genetic manipulation, the use of drugs that ’‘weaken the mind
and cloud intelligence’’ and the vast disparity between rich and poor.

’‘If yesterday sin had a rather individualistic dimension, today it
has a weight, a resonance, that’s especially social, rather than
individual,’’ Girotti said in an interview published Sunday in the
Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano about what he views as the ’‘new
sins.’’

I love the “penitentiary” business. Not as in Stateville, be it known,
but as in penance, which we do for our sins whether eligible for
... Read More...

No other churches for Obama to pick?

At some point, in some venue, Mr. Obama is going to have to give a speech directly addressing his longtime pastor’s views and answering a simple question: Why didn’t he find another church that didn’t include a leader who so frequently engaged in such hate speech?

That’s John Fund in WSJ.com’s Political Diary, voicing my very thought in the matter. It’s been 30 years (this month, in fact) since I regularly attended church on assignment. But I must say that there have to be other South Side churches and preachers — black, white, and indifferent — that don’t demagogue the Gospel.

In further Adventures of the Ed Page at Chi Trib, we see or may surmise that State’s Attorney Dick Devine went for top billing for an op-ed with this, beginning thus:

In recent weeks the Tribune has mentioned prosecutorial “misconduct” in its editorial pages. This is a term that grabs the public’s attention, so it is important that the efforts of our office on this issue be stated.

Nothing doing, as the world turned. Instead, unlike Mayor Daley yesterday and Congr. Jesse Jackson Jr. the day before, he is awarded no such encomium. His Voice of the People contribution, on the other hand, is a mere letter, albeit the lede.

No surprise there. He’s county, neither city nor congressional district, and lame duck besides.

Substantively speaking, he offers this as part of his defense of his office, recently criticized in a primary campaign and already criticized in the general:

“Our ... Read More...

Chi Trib is at it again, 2nd day in a row, surrendering top-billed op-ed space (hard-copy: it’s buried on the web site) to a politician blowing his own horn:

Property tax bills went out across Chicago last week, and homeowners are rightly concerned. They’re seeing the evidence that our property tax assessment system is broken and needs to be reformed.

The increases in property tax bills are due largely to higher assessments determined by the Cook County assessor, not a tax increase by the City of Chicago.

That’s the mayor speaking or writing, but who thinks he wrote it? And why, if he can be so calm and lucid, doesn’t he talk that way?

Again, we have perhaps a standing practice, in its best light encouraging op-ed dueling. But if that’s it, then give equal space, equally billed, to that highly suspect Cook County assessor. He is mentioned, yes:

I ... Read More...

I suppose this is standard, to let your hometown Congressman puff for the state’s favorite son, which is what Rep. J.J., Jr. is given top-billing op-ed space today to do. But it’s too much bending over (backward) to let the man have his say, ignoring the purely partisan politics of the case:

Read More of the Tribune Op-Ed
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/chi-oped0212delegatefeb12,0,4373892.story

That’s his lede for a 680-word argument aimed at heading off the Hillary cause, which favors those super delegates. What, no Hillary spokesman?

Rep. J.J.’s position deserves airing, but not in this position of privilege and not at such length in words entirely of ... Read More...

St. Odilo in Berwyn wound up its triduum of old-style Latin masses Tuesday night, Nov. 20, with not quite the 400 people of the first one, two weeks and one week earlier. Maybe 300 this time, parishioners and others who came out on a dark and stormy night to celebrate a divine mystery.

This was the holy sacrifice, commemorated and re-enacted in pre-Vatican IIfashion. Fr. Anthony Brankin, the pastor, had a few words beforehand from the pulpit, as he did for the first two. Follow what we are doing up here if you wish, he said, noting the booklets that were available for all. Or don’t, as it suits you. Just being there and drinking in the atmosphere would do it also.

Excellent advice. I for one find the same-old, same -old words of the mass to be, ah, highly repetitive, to cite the obvious. This is theater, after all. ... Read More...

Bob McClory *and all ye Call to Actionists past, present and future, be advised! Latin is coming! Latin is coming!
Yes, dear sisters and brothers, right here in Chicago River City, or just outside it, in beautiful Berwyn, where the church strangely named Odilo is taking the Holy Father in Rome up on his personal edict permitting old-style Latin mass wherever people want it.
Saint Odilo, that is, at 2244 East Avenue, a block north of Cermak, 6600 West as Chicago crows fly, on three consecutive Tuesdays, November 6, 13, and 20, at 7 p.m., “for the souls in Purgatory in the extraordinary form (Latin traditional).”
Nothing precipitous here. It will be four months since Pope Benedict announced that Tridentine (16th-century Council of Trent) masses are A-OK on priest and parish say-so, period.
Since 1988 it’s been OK on local bishop say-so, and ... Read More...

DePaul U. has hired two Catholic scholars for its new Catholic Studies program — Peter Casarella, of Catholic U., where he headed a Center for Medieval and Byzantine Studies, and Farrell O’Gorman, from Mississippi State U.’s English department.

Casarella has written about Christian Neo-Platonism, theological aesthetics, St. Bonaventure’s Trinitarian theology of creation, the idea of emergence in contemporary physics, and the Hispanic/Latino presence in the U.S. Catholic Church, according to a release.
He and his wife, then expecting their second child, and their one-year-old lived with students at Catholic U., in a get-close-to students dormitory arrangement. He has his doctorate from Yale.

O’Gorman has a “critically recognized” novel to his credit, “Awaiting Orders” (Idylls Press, 2006), in which he tries “to explore how a Christian message of hope and redemption can attain credibility,” said the America magazine reviewer — a far cry, to be sure, from what fiction readers ... Read More...

Evangelical Lutherans punted this summer in the matter of letting pastors have extramarital same-sex partners. Quarterbacking the play was Chicago’s own then-bishop, Rev. Paul Landahl, finishing up his six-year term with an NFL-worthy flourish. It happened at their annual meeting, in August at Navy Pier.
Landahl in effect called the play that split the difference between honoring and ignoring church law, proposing that bishops in the 65 synods of his Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) let things slide for now, refraining from ousting pastors in same-sex extramarital partnerships.
As the denomination’s top officer, Presiding Bishop Mark Hanson, told reporters, this would allow “some space and place” for living together in a changing world, “as a way to reflect this journey of conversation . . . ” on which ELCA members are embarked.
There are 4.8 million of these, twice as many as ... Read More...

Only 12 of 32 teachers in the U. of Notre Dame history department are Catholics, and last year of three new hires only one was Catholic. In English, when Kevin Hart, editor of ND-based Religion and Literature, objected to a candidate as “incompatible” with Notre Dame’s “Catholic mission,” he was “roundly criticized” and later decamped for U. of Virginia.

Except for theology and the law school, things are so bad under the golden dome that history prof Fr, Wilson D. Miscamble, a member of the Holy Cross Fathers, who founded and run the place, wants a quota — two-thirds of all future appointments to be Catholics. It would be preferential hiring for fish-eaters. As things stand, you can be too Catholic for Notre Dame, says Miscamble in the latest America Magazine.

Miscamble has a history of emphasizing the C-word, having nailed the ND president, a Holy Cross priest like himself, ... Read More...

Defending a proposed Aurora woman’s health center, pro-choice clerics recently took the high road. To deny access to abortion, they said in a Loop church, is to deny “moral standing” to people who want one, which is another way of saying we’re right and you’re wrong. Let’s not play that right-and-wrong game, if you don’t mind. Let’s get analytically philosophical, like the British did when I was getting scholastically philosophical in the 1950s.
First, health center. Chi Trib’s Eric Zorn tells us this center provides things besides abortion. Yes, but dear heart, where would Planned Non-parenthood be today if it did not provide abortion? They would be pushing pills that everybody has who wants them, victim of their own success. Abortion saved their goose.
Zorn, by the way, says if they lied to get the Aurora permit, that’s OK. Creative subterfuge, he called it, to head off ... Read More...

In SSPX (Society of Saint Pius X) territory this Sunday, mass was old-style Tridentine as usual, and so was the calendar. We had old-style 13th Sunday after Pentecost readings, which meant we heard nothing of Isaiah 66 predicting proclamation “to the distant coastlands” of Yahweh’s glory by means of horses, mules, and dromedaries.
Neither did we have Hebrews 12 with its encouragement to accept trials in life as acts of discipline by a loving father, namely Yahweh, known as God to most of us. Nor Luke 13 with the narrow-gate warning by Jesus: “Many are called, but few are chosen” in the old translation, and “Depart from me, ye cursed” – in the new version sanitized to read “Depart from me, all ye evildoers.” The meaning is the same pastorally speaking, but the punch is about half-strength.
However, we did hear Father Michael sermonizing on the importance ... Read More...

There is no joy in Jesuitville today, or less of it than a week ago when another Rev. Donald McGuire sexual-abuse victim filed suit. This one is not proven as victim, like those who testified in McGuire’s conviction last year in Wisconsin, but far more recently abused – 1999 to 2003 – per the complaint, and in Cook County, coming well under the statutory limitation, which heretofore has ruled prosecution out here.

The Jesuits heard the accusation, by a 21-year-old college student, in January and informed the office of Loyola Academy alumnus and state’s attorney Dick Devine soon afterward, they say. This was news to the state’s attorney’s people, who say they learned from complainants’ lawyers only this week.

t was also news to the Wisconsin court where McGuire was sentenced to seven years in prison and 20 years probation. If Wisconsin had known about the accusation, a prosecutor said, ... Read More...

Latin mass, anyone? What’s in store for Chicago?

By Jim Bowman

Quo vadis in Chicagoland, Latin mass? Where are you headed?

Where Chicago’s priests take you, if one is to judge from comments by three pastors holding considerably different views on the matter.

“Don’t look for the ‘old Latin mass’ [here] in the near future,” says a nay-sayer, Rev. Ronald Mass [sic], of Incarnation parish in Palos Heights, in his parish bulletin.

If you want it, Rev. John Farry, of St. Andrew parish, at Addison and Paulina, says he tells a parishioner, “you have to get 50 others, plan the service, get a choir.”

I want it, says Rev. Anthony Brankin, of St. Odilo, Berwyn, who plans to celebrate solemn high masses on four consecutive weekends later in the year, each at a regularly scheduled mass time, as a sort of pilot project.

These will be with organ and choir. ... Read More...